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DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS 



DARE WE BE 
CHRISTIANS 



BY 



WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



K 



COPYRIGHT, 1914 
BY LUTHER H. GARY 



Atl 



THE* PLIMPTON* PRESS 
NORWOOD* MASS- U'S'A 



NOV 12 1914 
)GI.A387510 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS 



DARE WE BE 
CHRISTIANS? 

CjrOD'S world is great; too great 
for a little mind like mine to hold. 
I have traveled over thousands of 
miles of it, but. for the most part 
my memory holds only a blur of 
space and movement. 

But there are a few places which 
my memory has made all my own. 
I know a place, just above Little 
Mud Turtle Lake, where the Gull 
River tilts around the rocks and 
sweeps in a curling crescent of foam 
around the wooded basin below 
the rapids. That place is mine 
because I swam in it with my boys; 
the river carried us down the rapids 
and around the whirlpool, shouting 
and laughing. 'Way up on the 
Ox Tongue River is a high, straight 
fall, and above it a platform of 

[7] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

rock. I lay there one night in the 
open, while the cool night wind 
moved the treetops, and watched 
the constellations march across the 
spaces between them. That place 
is mine by the emotions and prayers 
it inspired. 

The world of the Bible, too, 
is a great world. I have wandered 
through it all, but I have never 
made it all my own. But some 
friendly hills and valleys in it are 
mine by right of experience. Some 
chapters have comforted me; some 
have made me homesick; some have 
braced me like a bugle call; and 
some always enlarge me within 
by a sense of unutterable fellow- 
ship with a great, quiet Power 
that pervades all things and fills 
me. 

Such passages make up for each 
of us his Bible within the Bible, 
and the extent and variety of these 
claims he has staked out in it meas- 
ure how much of the great Book 
[8] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

has really entered into the sub- 
stance of his life. 

Paul's Praise of Love 

Some passages are common 
camping ground for us all. The 
thirteenth chapter of Paul's First 
Letter to the Corinthians is one 
of these. That half-page of print 
has been a force in human history. 
If we could follow its course through 
the generations, we should find it 
marked, like the windings of a 
brook, by a special greenness of 
life, by ferns and buttercups and 
gentians and cardinal flowers of 
human kindness. It has set the 
mired runnels of good-will flowing 
again. It has gentled our resent- 
ful feelings and made us forgiving. 
By making us feel the worth of 
love, it has made us feel the worth 
of those we ought to love. The 
old psalm ascribes to the pilgrim 
saints of God the capacity to **pass 
through the valley of weeping" 
[9] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

and leave it ''a place of springs." 
This saintly little chapter has done 
just that by its irrigation of affec- 
tion and cleansed will. 

It has such power to move us 
because it moved Paul deeply as he 
wrote it. His sentences suddenly 
grow rhythmic. His style runs into 
prose-poetry. His language rocks 
with the wave-beat of emotion. He 
was sure of a similar response from 
the Christian hearts to whom he 
was writing. This chapter is first- 
class evidence that primitive Chris- 
tianity was charged with a high 
voltage of human affection and 
social enthusiasm, for this Christian 
man was shaken with deep feeling 
as soon as he began to touch on this 
live subject that was sure and com- 
mon ground for the Christian con- 
sciousness. 

The chapter is also documentary 
evidence of inspiration. Here we 
can watch inspiration in the very 
act and see the spirit of Christ 

[lO] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS f 

bearing up the flutterings of the 
human mind with the sweep of 
mightier wings. 

Emotional Religion 

Paul apparently had not in- 
tended to write this chapter. It 
came to him while he was discuss- 
ing the vexed question of ''spiritual 
gifts." In aftertimes Christianity- 
came to mean largely creeds, rituals, 
rules, holy buildings and priests 
— a sort of religion at second hand 
with a reflected light and warmth. 
But in the first generation it came 
over men as a power direct from 
the unseen world; as a new and 
sweet vitality that melted their 
hearts with a glow of divine love 
and overwhelmed the baser pas- 
sions of the past; as a revelation 
and vision that made their intellect 
clairvoyant, creating an insight and 
foresight that transcended the 
mental powers of which they had 
previously been conscious, inspir- 
[II] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

ing prayers and longings so intense 
and lofty that they seemed to 
hear God's own spirit groaning in 
travail within their breasts. Such 
spiritual life was fertile in mani- 
fold expressions. The Christians 
called them *' spiritual gifts" and 
classified them. 

Now, when religion comes over 
a whole community with this ele- 
mental force, it is not an unmixed 
blessing. The power that estab- 
lishes the souls of the strong may 
unhinge the minds of the weak. 
Look around and you will find 
plenty of men and women who 
do not realize God in the life- 
giving power of the sunshine and 
the daily goodness of life, but who 
do realize him in thunderstorms, 
earthquakes and sudden blessings. 
Religion for them begins beyond 
the boundary line of the normal, 
and becomes the more divine the 
more abnormal it is. They take 
joy in yielding their emotions and 

[12] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

their intellect to mysterious powers 
and abdicating the possession of 
their own personality in favor of 
uncontrollable psychic forces. 

There was one ''gift" called 
''tongues." According to the traits 
mentioned by Paul in the four- 
teenth chapter it was a form of 
utterance with a maximum of emo- 
tion and a minimum of reason, 
cries and croonings that seemed 
repellant and insane to outsiders 
and unintelligible to Christians, and 
that left no clear thought even in 
the minds of those who spoke in 
''tongues." But it was no doubt 
very wonderful to those who took 
this plunge into the perfumed cat- 
aract of religious emotions. 

Some at Corinth were in doubt 
about this matter, as they well 
might be, and asked Paul to advise 
them. He took up the subject 
formally in the twelfth chapter. 
He pleaded for a broad-minded 
tolerance of all the "varieties of 

[13] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

religious experience." ''There are 
varieties of talents, but the same 
Spirit; varieties of service, but the 
same Lord; varieties of effects, 
but the same God who effects 
everything in everyone." As the 
richly-organized life of the human 
body depends on the manifoldness 
of its members and of their func- 
tions, so with the social body of 
a Christian community. 

Social Utility in Religion 

Thus Paul, as usual, stands for 
the broader and more inclusive 
attitude. But it is well worth 
noting that he pleads for this tol- 
eration, not because every indi- 
vidual has an inherent right to 
the expression of his peculiar re- 
ligious experiences and ideas, but 
because the interaction of many 
different capacities will in the end 
serve the common good. Paul is 
the patron saint of all modern 
religious individualists; his writ- 

[14] 



DA RE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

ings are their chief reliance in the 
Bible. Yet here he applies the test 
of social utility to the most inti- 
mate expression of religious life. 
He argues that religious diversity 
and individualism are good because 
they serve the community. 

This social estimate of religious 
endowments involves another 
thought which he brings out in 
the fourteenth chapter — namely 
that the various gifts must rank 
high or low in the Christian esti- 
mate according to the degree of 
their serviceableness to all. He 
held that "prophesying" was 
far better than ''speaking with 
tongues/' because it was rational, 
intelligible to all and sure to edu- 
cate the Christian intelligence of 
the whole group, while ''speaking 
with tongues" at most blessed him 
who spoke, but wasted the time 
and opportunity of the rest. So 
he demands that the needs of the 
community shall have the right of 

[15] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

way over private religious pleas- 
ures, and advises those who ''speak ' 
with tongues" to do it in the 
privacy of their own prayers. 

This was very clever of Paul. 
Most of the abnormal and highly- 
wrought manifestations of religion 
suck their strength from popular 
notice and admiration. Isolate them 
and they wilt. Paul did here for 
religious emotionalism what Jesus 
did for the religious formalism of 
the Pharisees, when he advised 
them to take their long prayers 
into their closets and see how much 
would be left of them if God alone 
took notice of them. 

In favoring prophesying over 
''speaking with tongues" Paul pre- 
fers religion plus reason to religion 
minus reason — a principle of im- 
mense practical importance. And 
here again he takes the social 
ground that religion which has 
utility for the community is better 
than religion which serves only 
[i6] 



I 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

personal needs, even if the latter 
seems the more wonderful and 
inspired. 

Thus we have in the twelfth and 
fourteenth chapters two main lines 
of thought: first, that the Christian 
Church can tolerate a large diver- 
sity of religious forces and forms 
of expression, provided they all 
serve the common good; second, 
that those forms of religion rank 
highest which are most completely 
under the direction of reason and 
most serviceable to the whole 
group. 

I repeat that the precision with 
which Paul brings out this social 
criterion in religious questions is 
unstudied evidence of the strong 
social force set free by the Christian 
religion. Paul often asserted that 
every act of a Christian man should 
be upborne by religious impulses; 
even when we eat and drink we 
should do so "in Christ" and "to 
the glory of God." But here he 

[17] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS: 

Sticks to the reverse of this just 
as tenaciously, affirming that all 
religious life must have social 
utility and that its value is 
measured by its social qualities. 

Now it had apparently been in 
Paul's mind to pass directly from 
the discussion in the twelfth chapter 
about the manifoldness of spiritual 
gifts to the second part of the dis- 
cussion, in the fourteenth chapter, 
about the superior value of proph- 
esying. He was about to make 
the transition in the thirty-first 
verse: ''Set your mind on the 
higher gifts"; that is, so far as 
you have a choice, cultivate those 
spiritual experiences which will be 
most fruitful to all. He later has 
to come back to this transitional 
thought at the beginning of the 
fourteenth chapter: ''Follow after 
love; yet desire earnestly spir- 
itual gifts, especially the gift of 
prophesying." 

[i8] 



dare we be christians? 

An Inspired Interruption 

But the smooth progress of his 
argument is interrupted. A still 
more important thought demands 
the right of way. '' Hold ! Listen ! 
There is something still higher and 
more excellent. All speaking with 
tongues, all prophesying, all re- 
ligious insight, all miracle-working 
faith, all alms-giving, all the hero- 
ism of martyrdom, are condemned 
to futility unless love is an ingre- 
dient in them." 

This unintentional origin of 
Paul's praise of love is to me one 
of the most suggestive facts about 
it. One of the most beautiful and 
powerful religious utterances in all 
literature thus rose spontaneously 
from a Christian soul. It is as 
if an angel had touched him on the 
shoulder and said: ''Speak the 
final word, Paul! Tell them the 
greatest thing of all." So here 
we catch inspiration in the act. 

[19] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS: 

The quiet, logical march of the 
argument was burst apart by a 
thought so divine and insistent that 
it could not wait, and that thought 
was the indispensableness of love 
in religion. 

But in reality it was no interrup- 
tion. Inspiration does not paralyze 
reason but intensifies it; it does 
not tear up the track of true argu- 
ment, but lifts argument to higher 
levels. In form this praise of love 
is an interlude, an intermezzo in 
adagio cantahile; in substance 
it was the real climax of the 
whole reasoning. The fundamental 
Christian consciousness of Paul de- 
manded utterance and everything 
else had to stand aside. The dis- 
cussion about the relative value of 
tongues and prophesying, which 
was to have been the culmination, 
becomes a mere corollary after 
Christ has spoken in Paul. 

For the emphasis on love was 
that spiritual strain which he had 
[20] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

most directly derived from the 
Master himself. To Jesus the law 
of love was so great and all-inclu- 
sive that he felt it summed up 
and superseded the whole majestic 
framework of the Jewish law. 
Jesus transformed the inherited 
conceptions of God himself by bap- 
tizing the Hebrew Jehovah in love 
and reintroducing the imperious 
King of Sinai to humanity as the 
Father whom they might love be- 
cause he loved them to the death. 
So it was the inspiration of the 
spirit of Christ which spoke up 
in Paul when he paused to assert 
that love is the last and best word 
of life and the indispensable in- 
gredient of all that claims to be 
Christian. 

Does Paul, then, at this highest 
point of his argument turn his 
back on the demand for social 
utility which he expressed in the 
other parts.? On the contrary. In 
demanding love he demands social 

[21] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

solidarity. Love is the social in- 
stinct, the power of social coher- 
ence, the sine qua non of human 
society. In putting his hand on 
love as the essential thing in the 
Christian life, he laid hold at the 
same time of the most important 
thing in all social philosophy. For 
if there were no love there would 
be no sociology. 

We Need a Modern Supplement 

The supreme value of love 
emerged in Paul's mind when he 
was looking for a clear landmark 
to guide himself and his Corin- 
thian friends across the uncharted 
sea of emotional religion. Now, 
the specific questions with which 
he had to deal have become obso- 
lete. The ** spiritual gifts" died 
out in the second or third genera- 
tion, as they have always died out 
gradually in later inspirational 
Christian bodies. Few of us have 

[22] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

ever heard anyone speak in 
^* tongues." But love is as great 
and indispensable as ever. The 
demand that religion shall be so- 
cially fruitful has been taken up 
by all the world today with an 
insistent cry that has shaken the 
Church and has produced an over- 
hauling of all its life. 

We ought to see the indispen- 
sableness of love amid the facts of 
the twentieth century with the 
same precision and the same Chris- 
tian enthusiasm as Paul saw it in 
the first century. We have a long 
historical perspective of nineteen 
hundred years where Paul had only 
the clouded mirror of prophetic 
foresight. We have the vast hor- 
izon of modern international re- 
lations, the huge conflicts of social 
forces, against which we must see 
the need of love, whereas Paul 
lived in the main within the slender 
groups of Christians scattered 
through Asia Minor and Greece, 
[23] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

focussing their interests intensely, 
and seeing all the other mighty 
social forces of the Roman Empire 
only as the dark and heaving back- 
ground of Christian martyrdom and 
triumph. 

It is no great evidence of Chris- 
tian faith and inspiration if we re- 
hearse Paul's points of view and 
misinterpret our world by super- 
imposing his world over it. Have 
we faith enough to believe that 
the Christian doctrine of love is 
the solution of our big modern 
questions? Do we dare to assert 
the futility of everything in our 
great world of commerce and in- 
dustry that leaves love out? Do 
we dare to undertake the readjust- 
ment of all social life to bring it 
into obedience to the law of love? 
That is a far severer test of our 
faith in Christ than to believe in 
the infallibility of a book or in the 
certainty of dogmas formulated so 
long ago that only a few hundred 

[24] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

men in Christendom today know 
what they originally were meant 
to mean. 

We need a modern supplement 
to Paul's praise of love, written 
in the face of present-day prob- 
lems and with a twentieth-century 
point of view, but with the same 
old Christian enthusiasm for love 
and the same old faith in the power 
of Jesus Christ to inspire love. I 
have not Paul's mind. I have 
neither the severe consistency of 
his reasoning nor the swift terse- 
ness of his phrases nor the blazing 
heat of his sacrificial enthusiasm — 
and it seems an amusing work of 
supererogation even to disavow any 
such thought. But I take him at 
his word — that ''there are diver- 
sities of gifts but the same spirit" 
— and propose to write a few varia- 
tions on his Leitmotif, which he, 
in turn, got from our common 
Master. 

[25] 



dare we be christians? 

The Scope of Love in Society 

In order to understand the place 
of love in human life we must first 
understand the scope of the word 
we use, the manifoldness and reach 
of the force we are to discuss. 

Whenever the Christian religion 
comes to a new people, it finds the 
native vocabulary defective for its 
special purposC/S. In the rich vo- 
cabulary of the Greek language it 
could find plenty of words to express 
hate, but none that signified hu- 
mility without casting on it the 
slur of servility, and none that 
signified love without a taint of 
sexual suggestiveness. When King 
James' Version was made for the 
English the translators of this 
chapter took refuge in the frosty 
word "charity" as more ecclesiast- 
ical, safe and proper. The men 
who made the Revised Version 
in 1 88 1 risked the plain English 
"love," but even yet the idea of 
[26] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

sex dominates the involuntary as- 
sociations of ideas which it drags 
along with it. 

The attraction between man and 
woman is indeed the most striking 
and stirring form of love. We 
can gauge its force by the intense 
joy of its satisfactions, and the 
agony when love is unrequited or 
its trust wronged or its faithfulness 
broken. Two persons, at opposite 
poles in their physical tastes, their 
aesthetic habits, their aims in life, 
perhaps strangers to each other 
until recently, break away from the 
family bonds of a lifetime and enter 
into a physical and mental intimacy 
of life which binds them in a lasting 
social partnership of work and 
mutual care. If it were not ian 
old story it would be a miracle. 
Even its reflected sensations are 
so charming that we never tire of 
reading love stories or discreetly 
watching them in real life. 

But the love of the sexes is only 
[27] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

a specialized form of that larger 
love which pervades our race. The 
absorbing interest that lovers take 
in each other is only an enrichment 
and intensification of that purely 
human interest which we take in 
any person we like. The more of 
that general interest there is fused 
with the special passion, the nobler 
and more durable will it be. If 
there is nothing but sex-desire we 
call it vice. As Tolstoi has finely 
said, a man loves his wife purely if 
he thinks of her as his sister as well 
as his wife. 

The institution of the family 
places upon sex-love a heavy load 
of work and obligation, and so 
tames it. Society practically says 
to sex-desire what Paul said to 
emotional religion: **Thou must be 
socially useful or thou shalt get 
no respect or countenance from us. 
If thou wilt form a co-operative 
group for service and bear children 
for humanity, we will honor and 
[28] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

protect; if not, we will punish." 
There are some who think it would 
be wiser to take the saddle, the bit 
and the bridle from this vagrant 
and restless and greedy desire, let- 
ting it bear only such social obliga- 
tions as it chooses and as long as 
it chooses. I do not care to live 
long enough to see that. 

Through the attraction of man 
and maid love is always weaving 
new combinations of lives, reaching 
out to the right and the left and 
knitting threads that had no con- 
nections before, bringing whole 
groups of families into friendly 
cooperation and laughing at the 
efforts of the proud to isolate 
themselves from the rest of their 
kind. 

At the same time love is pre- 
paring to connect the present and 
the future generations. To lovers 
their love seems their own peculiar 
joy and apart from all the world. 
But Humanity stands in the shadow 
[29] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

behind them and Hfts the majestic 
hands of blessing above them. The 
indomitable spirit of the race is 
reaching out in them toward the 
better days that are to be and 
is flinging a new defiance to death 
as they affirm life together. 

Out of their union buds the next 
generation of men, and at once 
love springs forward to bind the 
young and the mature in a new and 
amazing bond. The love of father- 
hood and motherhood is a divine 
revelation and miracle. It is a 
creative act of God in us. Last 
year it was not; this year it is, 
and all things are changed. The 
dry rock of our selfishness has been 
struck and the water of sacrificial 
love pours forth. The thorn-bush 
is aflame with a beautiful fire that 
does not consume. The springing 
up of this new force of love is essen- 
tial for the very existence of human 
society. Unless it were promptly 
forthcoming, children would die like 
[30] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

the flies of later summer and the 
race would perish. 

These family affections are the 
most striking and powerful forms of 
human love. They have the sup- 
port of physical nearness and of 
constant intercourse and habit. 
But the social impulse of the race 
is just as truly at work in the keen 
interest we take ' in a chance-met 
stranger, in the cheer we feel in 
meeting a boyhood friend, in the 
sense of comradeship with those 
who work or play alongside of us. 
Every normal man has uncounted 
relations of good-will, and the mo- 
bility of modern life has immensely 
increased the contacts for most of 
us. 

Love takes on as many forms in 
society as life assumes in vegeta- 
tion. When it turns toward the 
strong and noble we call it admir- 
ation. When it turns down to- 
ward the helpless we call it pity 
and compassion. The sense of ob- 

[31] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

ligation and sympathy that draws 
young men and women to share 
the Ufe of the poor or the backward 
races is love. The loyalty we feel 
for the great leaders in politics or 
war, for the masters of science, 
poetry, or wisdom, is a specialized 
form of love. 

Almost every personal relation 
of affection connects us with a 
group of people who have the same 
interest or who are somehow iden- 
tified with persons whom we love. 
So the love for one man promptly 
widens out into the love of many 
and weaves more closely the web 
of social life. 

But many of our loves are di- 
rectly for groups and organiza- 
tions of men — for our church, our 
lodge, our fraternity, our college, 
our party. All such relationships 
are strong in just the degree in 
which they evoke love. The cohe- 
sion of selfishness is brittle. Sel- 
fishness sticks while it feeds, and 
[32] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

then wipes its mouth and turns 
away. Love alone creates endur- 
ing loyalties and persuades the 
individual to give up something 
of his own for the common good 
of society. Therefore all organiza- 
tions cultivate loyalty and the 
team spirit. ^'The team spirit" is 
a modern name for the wider, 
cooperative love. 

Still larger than these selective 
group-relations is the patriotic en- 
thusiasm for city, state, and coun- 
try. In times of common peril or 
deliverance we realize the enor- 
mous power of this vast collective 
love, which shakes men with fierce 
emotion and sends them to wounds, 
sickness and death. Here, too, love 
is the real cement of society. The 
state has the right and power of 
coercion, but any state that relies 
chiefly on force is perishable and 
doomed. Republics may be slov- 
enly and ill-prepared, but they 
have great staying powers in war, 

[33] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

because they are sustained by the 
love of the people. No state can 
afford to disregard the disaffection 
of a large class or the work of any 
party that substitutes sullenness 
and contempt for patriotic pride. 

Thus love widens out from the 
jealous desire of a lover who mon- 
opolizes the caresses of his beloved, 
to the large devotion of the great 
lovers of mankind and the leaders 
of humane causes. The firm mouth 
and strong jaws of Washington's 
portraits do not symbolize love to 
us like the tender face of the Ma- 
donna brooding over her child, 
but the steadfast devotion with 
which he lifted his country and his 
cause through years of strain and 
fear was an equally sublimated 
type of love, the love of a strong 
man who serves his country. 

In all its forms love creates an 
enjoyment of contact and a desire 
for more of it, a sense of the worth 
and human beauty of those we 

[34] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS: 

love, pride in their advancement, 
joy in their happiness, pain in their 
suffering, a consciousness of unity, 
an identity of interests, an instinc- 
tive reaUzation of soUdarity. 

This is the wide sense in which 
we must use the word ''love" if 
we are to realize the incomparable 
power and value of love in human 
life. Our understanding of life de- 
pends on our comprehension of 
the universal power of love. Our 
capacity to build society depends 
on our power of calling out love. 
Our faith in God and Christ is 
measured by our faith in the value 
and workableness of love. 

Love and Social Progress 

Every step of social progress 
demands an increase in love. The 
history of evolution is a history ^* 
of the appearance and the expan- 
sion of love. The first dawn of 
social cohesion appears in the love 

[35] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

of parent animals for their young. 
The sympathetic type emerges as 
we ascend the scale of life. The 
offspring of love survive, propagate, 
and bequeath their capacity for 
love. Nature, by the power of life 
and death, weeds out the loveless 
and increases the totality of love 
in the universe. 

In the history of man social 
organization began in groups that 
had common blood and the sense 
of kinship to bind them. Every 
enduring enlargement of political 
organization demands a basis of 
fellow-feeling, and love as well as 
common economic interests. Kings 
and statesmen have tried to patch 
nations and races together by 
treaties or coercion, but unless in- 
termarriage has fused the blood, 
and religion and common suffering 
have welded the spirits of the 
people, empires have dropped apart 
again along the ancient lines of 
cleavage. The history of the Ger- 
[36] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

mans, the Italians and the Slavs 
in the nineteenth century and to- 
day consists largely of the effort to 
undo the artificial cobbling and 
stitching of kingcraft and to allow 
the nations to coalesce in common- 
wealths along the lines marked out 
by national love and race coher- 
ence. 

We can watch the society-making 
force of love at work in the crea- 
tion of new social organizations. 
Not even a little local trade union 
nor lodge nor church nor club 
can be made successful unless there 
are in its membership some indi- 
viduals with the higher qualities of 
enthusiasm and affection. Selfish 
interests are necessary, too, for 
durability, but love is the real 
chemical for amalgamation. 

Where new organizations have 
to overcome resistance and hos- 
tility, as in the case of new relig- 
ious movements or in the labor 
movement and socialism, the com- 

[37] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS: 

mon suffering and the need of sym- 
pathetic support of mind by mind 
create a wonderful fund of fraternal 
love. Perhaps from the larger 
point of view of God the selfish 
opposition of those who resist the 
movements of the people may be 
justified by the fact that the labor 
and suffering which they impose 
upon the lower classes evokes love 
and creates solidarity — much as 
the travail and toil of childbearing 
binds the mother to her child — ■ 
and so fits the new social group for 
future control. 

Cooperative organizations are a 
remarkable demonstration of the 
society-making power of love. 
Judged from a financial point of 
view they have no chance of sur- 
vival. Those who organize them 
usually have little capital, little 
experience, little business ability. 
The cooperatives are matched 
against the best survivors of cap- 
italistic competition, and their en- 
[38] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

trance into the field often causes a 
united effort of all their competi- 
tors to keep them down, while they 
themselves are forbidden by their 
principles to undersell the others. 
Yet with proper management they 
have slowly built up an interna- 
tional success that commands the 
increasing admiration of social 
students. Their strength is in love. 
They succeed best among the lower 
classes, who always have to prac- 
tise interdependence. They utilize 
strong neighborly feeling, the good- 
will of old acquaintanceship and 
kinship, or the new loyalty of" so- 
cialist convictions, and the hatred 
for exploitation. They do not 
succeed among classes where every 
man is for himself, intent on ad- 
vancing personally and quite will- 
ing to leave others behind. The 
next fifty years will see a long con- 
test for survival and dominion 
between the capitalistic and the 
cooperative type of organization. 

[39] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

The former is strong through self- 
ishness and possession; the latter 
through the resources of love. 

Thus love is the society-making 
force. Social progress depends on 
the available supply of love. If 
the sense of solidarity is so strong 
that injustice and oppression are 
intolerable to all and the creation 
of new fraternal relations is swift 
and easy, then society can effi- 
ciently meet every new strain. If 
one large class has no fellow-feeling 
and conscious regard for another 
large class, a flaw runs through the 
girder and it may split under 
pressure. 

The Breakdown of Love 

This is exactly the situation 
which confronts us in the indus- 
trial world in all nations, including 
our own. Love has failed between 
great social classes of men. The 
working class have become doubt- 
ful of the identity of interest be- 
[40] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS: 

tween them and the employing 
and possessing class. They feel 
they are being victimized and not 
led. They lag in their work. The 
spontaneous capacities of labor 
evoked by love lie dormant in them. 
They feel that they are hirelings 
and not friends of those who con- 
trol their lives. They believe the 
share of the collective wealth which 
is paid over to them is determined 
by their own weakness and the 
legal and economic power of the 
opposing group, and not by the 
productive value of their work nor 
by their human needs. 

This interpretation of their re- 
lations may be mistaken in detail. 
Where love is lacking, the atmos- 
phere becomes clouded with sus- 
picion and misunderstandings, and 
it becomes increasingly hard to 
see the truth, even for those who 
desire to see it. But where the 
area of hostility is so wide, the 
feeling so bitter, and the funda- 

[41] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

mental charge of injustice so fre- 
quently and clearly substantiated, 
no excuse or counter-charge can 
settle the question any longer. 
Jesus says if we become conscious 
that our brother has a grievance 
against us, it becomes the prime 
concern of our mind to make the 
matter right. Even if the con- 
sciousness comes to us when we 
are engaged in the most solemn and 
reverential act of religion, we are 
to drop everything and first heal 
the broken fellowship and establish 
love. The upper classes through- 
out the world are in that position. 
Their right of occupation and the 
justice of their stewardship are 
under challenge. The gravest issue 
is not simply a question of dollars 
and cents, but of the sterilization 
of love by social injustice. If love 
is really as important to God and 
humanity as we have said, this 
social antagonism becomes a very 
serious thing to a religious mind. 
[42] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

Must we permanently live in a love- 
less industrial world, or do we dare 
to be Christians? 

The frequency with which our 
communities have to fall back on 
physical coercion is a symptom of 
the failure of love, for love can 
usually dispense with force. The 
more love, the less force; the more 
force, the less love. Despotic gov- 
ernment had to use plentiful force 
to keep its unnatural structure 
erect. The spread of democracy 
has brought a great softening of 
the horrors of criminal law and it 
will yet bring us a great lessening 
of militarism. Every proposed in- 
crease in police force and military 
organization is a challenge and 
accusation against those institu- 
tions of society which ought to 
create social solidarity. If ever our 
country draws toward its ruin, it 
will bristle with efficient arsenals 
and hired fighters. The constant 
use of military violence in labor dis- 

[43] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

putes in our country proves that 
industry is still in the despotic | 
t t stage. It needs democratizing and j 

Christianizing. 

Love and Modern Business 

The severest test and the most 
urgent task of love today is in the 
field of business life. Unless love 
can dominate the making of wealth, 
the wealth of our nation will be 
the ferment of its decay. There 
will be no genuine advance for 
human society until business ex- 
periences the impulse, the joy, and 
the mental fertility of free team- 
work. As long as industry is built 
on fundamental antagonisms and 
the axle of every wheel is hot with 
smothered resentment, there can 
be no reign of love and no new era 
of civilization. Our age is asking 
the leaders of the business world to 
take a great constructive forward 
step and to found business on or- 
ganized love. It summons them to 

[44] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

be Christians in business. It seems 
like a leap in the dark. Will they 
dare ? 

Every great engineering work is 
financed by the stored labor of 
the past. In the same way all 
moral progress must draw on the 
reservoir of righteous purpose and 
human sympathy stored by religion. 
Is there enough love in our nation 
to back up a great moral advance ? 

Whoever utilizes a woman to 
satisfy his desires, without respect- 
ing her soul and her equal human 
worth, prostitutes her. Whoever 
utilizes a man to satisfy his desire 
for wealth, without respecting his 
soul and his equal human worth, 
and without realizing the beating 
heart and hopes of his fellow, pros- 
titutes him. Whoever gives the 
consent of his mind to getting un- 
earned gain, to getting more from 
his fellows than he returns to them 
in service, steps outside of the 
realm of love. If the law protects 

[45] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

semi-predatory undertakings it in- 
volves all the citizens of a de- 
mocracy in wrong-doing. If the 
Church looks on injustice without 
holy anger it allows the institution 
'of redemptive love to give shelter 
to lovelessness, and is itself in- 
volved in the charge of hypocrisy. 

Paul laid on religion the indis- 
pensableness of love. The Chris- 
tian Church must lay the same 
law on modern business. Thus: 

// / create wealth beyond the dream 
of past ages and increase not love, 
my heat is the flush of fever and my 
success will deal death. 

Though I have foresight to locate 
the fountains of riches, and power 
to preempt them, and skill to tap them, 
and have no loving vision for human- 
ity, I am blind. 

Though I give of my profits to the 
poor and make princely endowments 
for those who toil for me, if I have no 
human fellowship of love with them 
my life is barren and doomed. 
[46] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

Love is just and kind. Love is 
not greedy and covetous. Love ex- 
ploits no one; it takes no unearned 
gain; it gives more than it gets. 
Love does not break down the lives 
of others to make wealth for itself; 
it makes wealth to build the life of all. 
Love seeks solidarity; it tolerates no 
divisions; it prefers equal work- 
mates; it shares its efficiency. Love 
enriches all men, educates all men, 
gladdens all men. 

The values created by love never 
fail; but whether there are class 
privileges, they shall fail; whether 
there are millions gathered, they shall 
be scattered; and whether there are 
vested rights, they shall be abolished. 
For in the past strong men lorded 
it in ruthlessness and strove for their 
own power and pride, but when the 
perfect social order comes, the strong 
shall serve the common good^ Before 
the sun of Christ brought in the dawn, 
men competed, and forced tribute 
from weakness, but when the full day 

[47] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

shall come, they will work as mates 
in love, each for all and all for each: 
For now we see in the fog of selfish" 
ness, darkly, but then with social 
vision; now we see our fragmentary 
ends, but then we shall see the des- 
tinies of the race as God sees them. 
But now abideth honor, justice, and 
love, these three; and the greatest of 
these is love. 

Love Validates Itself 

Love carries its own validation. 
It proves its own efficiency and 
trustworthiness in action. Selfish- 
ness always looks safe ; love always 
looks like an enormous risk. But 
many a man has found that when 
all his other securities had depre- 
ciated, love still paid dividends. 
Those who are too timid to embark 
in some venture of love are finally 
left on the desert shores of a life 
without interest or hope. 

We never live so intensely as 
[48] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS: 

when we love strongly. We never 
realize ourselves so vividly as when 
we are in the full glow of love for 
others. 

Love establishes the fullest in- 
tellectual contact with the world 
about us. It has a passionate de- 
sire for full comprehension, whereas 
selfishness loses interest as soon as 
it has made the other serve its 
ends. To understand things and 
people we must love them. Love 
is the greatest educator, the most 
permanent stimulus of the in- 
tellectual life. The animals that 
stand out among others by their 
intelligence — the dog, the ant, the 
bee, the elephant — are all social 
and gregarious beings; a beast that 
lives a solitary life must have in- 
cessant training to learn a few poor 
tricks. A selfish person becomes a 
stupid person if he lives long 
enough. Other things being equal, 
the loving people are the wise 
people. Selfishness grinds a thin 

[49] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

edge on the mind but this edge 
turns and then makes a ragged 
cut. Love has the keenest insight 
and yet does not hurt. Selfish 
cleverness sees keenly the surface 
mechanisms of life which it wants 
to manipulate; love instinctively 
imparts the deeper secrets and 
larger meanings of God's world. 
The light of true wisdom does not 
fall on the facts of life from any 
outward source; it is shed only 
from the inner eye of him who 
beholds them, and if his inner eye 
is darkened, there is no wisdom in 
all the world for him. 

Love demands sacrifice, and sac- 
rifice seems the denial and surrender 
of life. Actually love is the great 
intensifier of life^ and giving our 
life preserves it. By seeking life 
selfishly, we lose it; when we lose 
it for love we gain it. We are 
far more active and self-assertive 
when we impart than when we 
receive. It is literally true that 
[SO] 



DARE WE. BE CHRISTIANS? 

''it is more bl'^ssed to give than to 
receive." 

When people have lived for forty 
years and their desires begin to 
flag, the great test of age arrives. 
If they have launched young bodies 
and minds on the great adventur- 
ous cruise of life, there are still for 
them the hoisting of pennants, the 
slap of the open sea, the forebod- 
ing of the storm, the pride of the 
successful homeward run. If they 
have identified themselves for years 
with some cause of humanity — the 
cause of temperance or purity or 
peace or justice — working for it 
and suffering for it, their lives will 
have a meaning and a hope and a 
great pride to the end. But if 
they have fed no life but their own, 
have no investments except dollars 
and must pay for all the sympathy 
they get, they are locked in a gray 
prison which they have built for 
themselves. Such lives are truly 
old, even if their bodies are kept 

[SI] 



DARE WE BE CHF.ISTIANS? 

young by all the skill that money 
buys. They have lost the funda- 
mental contacts with the world. 
If we knew the profound loneliness 
and monotony of many people who 
have preferred wealth to the bur- 
dens and risks of love, we should 
not dash for the bait which they 
gorged. 

On the other hand love rejuve- 
nates life. When, occasionally, old 
people take a new plunge into love, 
they grow so young and dapper 
that everybody laughs. We can 
watch the same wonder when a 
child comes to people who have 
longed for one for years. So love 
is the fountain of youth which the 
Spanish conquistadores sought. It 
was located in America after all, 
but, being "'conquerors," they 
could never have found it. 

Jesus said that love is the su- 
preme law of life and the thing 
men live by. Love validates the 
assertion. It pays as it goes. 
[52] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

Nothing else does pay in the long 
run. The more true happiness and 
abiding satisfaction we have had 
from love, the more ought we to 
trust it as the true way of life. 

The Outcome 

If, now, love is so all-pervasive 
and manifold in the life of human- 
ity; if it is indeed the indispensable 
condition for the existence and 
progress of society; if it has proved 
its constructive value and superior 
efficiency whenever it has received 
a fair test, then I ask all who have 
followed these thoughts to the end 
to affirm with me their faith in 
love and to make a new committal 
to the cause of establishing love 
on earth. We must not only ac- 
cept it and enjoy it when it 
comes to us, but we must seek it, 
cultivate it and propagate it like 
health, wealth and education. It 
is not an incidental blessing, but 
the first and fundamental law of 

[S3] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

God, written in our hearts, and 
written large in all the world about 
us. When we heal love that has 
been torn, remove all contradic- 
tions of love from the outward re- 
lations of our life and allow love to 
become our second nature, we 
shall deserve the highest patent of 
nobility — to be called sons of God. 
If love involves loss, we must ac- 
cept the loss. Christ did. If self- 
ishness seems to work better than 
love, we must have faith in love. 
Just as a business man invests 
money for years in a business prop- 
osition because he has faith in it, 
so we must stake our fortune on 
love and feel sure of coming out 
ahead in the venture. Why else do 
we call ourselves Christians.? 

Love and Christianity 

From this sunlit hill-top of re- 
flection we may gain a fresh vision 
of the significance of Christianity. 

A man is a Christian in the 

[54] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

degree in which he shares the spirit 
and consciousness of Jesus Christ, 
conceiving God as Jesus knew him 
and seeing human Hfe as Jesus 
reaHzed it. None of us has ever 
done this fully, but on the other 
hand there is no man within the 
domain of Christendom who has 
not been influenced by Christ in 
some way. 

Now Jesus with incomparable 
spiritual energy set love into the 
center of religion. He drove home 
the duty of love with words so 
mighty that our race can never 
again forget them. He embodied 
the principle of love in the undying 
charm and youthful strength of 
his own life in such a way as to 
exert an assimilating compulsion 
over more lives than we can num- 
ber. He was conscious of God as 
a sunny and lovable presence and 
he taught his friends to think of 
God as a father who loved them un- 
selfishly and wanted nothing from 

[55] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS 



? 



them except love. This conception 
of God was reenforced when men 
saw in the cross the great declara- 
tion of the redemptive love of God^ 
As the outcome of the life and 
death of Jesus, a body of organized 
life and thought was set in motion 
through history which interpreted 
the universe from the point of view 
of love and saw all ethical questions 
and duties with love at the center. 
If this movement had died out in 
the second century but its lit- 
erature had been preserved, all 
thoughtful men today, of every 
school of philosophy, would point 
to it as the fairest and most bril- 
liant venture ever made in the field 
of morals and religion. But it 
did not die. It has such religious 
vitality and organizing force that 
it survived and spread. Though 
only a fragment of its original 
faith was dissolved and embodied 
in the institutions of society, it 
made the nations that adopted it 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

the dominant nations of the earth. 
Every time that faith was cleansed 
of its foreign contaminations, every 
time more of its force was released 
and embodied in social life, the 
history of Western civilization 
dated a new epoch. In spite of all 
failures the Christian religion has 
been the one organized force in 
the Western world which has con- 
sciously sought to increase love. 

Christianity stands for the belief 
that *'God is love." It has suc- 
ceeded in making that tremendous 
assertion of faith a commonplace. 
In so far as we have taken that 
doctrine seriously it has revolu- 
tionized our spiritual outlook and 
put a new face on the universe. 

Christianity stands for the 
doctrine that we must love one 
another — all men, without dis- 
tinction of *' religion, race, color 
or previous condition of servitude." 
It will tolerate no exempt breed 
of supermen and no preempted 

[57] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS? 

areas of God's common world. It 
does not call on the strong to climb 
to isolation across the backs of the 
weak, but challenges them to prove 
their strength by lifting the rest 
with them. It does not advise 
eliminating the unfit, but seeks 
to make them fit. It stands for 
the solidarity of the race in its 
weakness and strength, its de- 
feats and conquests, its sin and 
salvation. 

If love is the greatest thing in 
the world and if it is the prime 
condition of social progress, what 
of the Christian religion, which 
has identified itself with faith in 
love ? 

Every man can profit by the his- 
torical influences of Christianity 
and be a passive pensioner on its 
vested funds. But it clearly needs 
active personal agents who will 
incarnate its vitalities, propagate 
its principles, liberate its unde- 
veloped forces, purify its doctrine 
[58] 



DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS: 

and extend the sway of its faith 
in love over new realms of social 
life. Dare we be such men? Dare 
we be Christians? Those who take 
up the propaganda of love and 
substitute freedom and fraternity 
for coercion and class differences 
in social life are the pioneers of 
the Kingdom of God ; for the reign 
of the God of love will be fulfilled 
in a life of humanity organized on 
the basis of solidarity and love. 



[59] 



H 154 82 i 



I 



"Do we dare to assert the futility of 
everything in our great world of commerce 
and industry that leaves love out?*' 












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